Perl VS Zig benchmarks

Current benchmark data was generated on Sun Jul 13 2025, full log can be found HERE

CONTRIBUTIONS are WELCOME!

[x86_64][4 cores] AMD EPYC 7763 64-Core Processor (Model 1)

* -m in a file name stands for multi-threading or multi-processing

* -i in a file name stands for direct intrinsics usage. (Usage of simd intrinsics via libraries is not counted)

* -ffi in a file name stands for non-stdlib FFI usage

* (You may find time < time(user) + time(sys) for some non-parallelized programs, the overhead is from GC or JIT compiler, which are allowed to take advantage of multi-cores as that's more close to real-world scenarios.)

binarytrees

Input: 18

lang code time stddev peak-mem mem time(user) time(sys) compiler compiler/runtime
zig 1.zig 1872ms 186ms 49.0MB 1840ms 17ms zig 0.14.1
perl 1.pl timeout 0.0ms 77.8MB 4963ms 23ms perl 5.40.2

Input: 15

lang code time stddev peak-mem mem time(user) time(sys) compiler compiler/runtime
zig 1.zig 152ms 2.9ms 7.0MB 140ms 0ms zig 0.14.1
perl 1.pl 1814ms 11ms 14.4MB 1800ms 0ms perl 5.40.2

fasta

Input: 2500000

lang code time stddev peak-mem mem time(user) time(sys) compiler compiler/runtime
zig 1.zig 88ms 0.8ms 1.0MB 80ms 0ms zig 0.14.1
perl 1.pl 3699ms 175ms 10.9MB 3687ms 0ms perl 5.40.2

Input: 250000

lang code time stddev peak-mem mem time(user) time(sys) compiler compiler/runtime
zig 1.zig 11ms 0.8ms 1.0MB 0ms 0ms zig 0.14.1
perl 1.pl 365ms 1.2ms 6.6MB 357ms 0ms perl 5.40.2

helloworld

Input: QwQ

lang code time stddev peak-mem mem time(user) time(sys) compiler compiler/runtime
zig 1.zig 0.9ms 0.0ms 1.1MB 0ms 0ms zig 0.14.1
perl 1.pl 2.7ms 0.4ms 5.3MB 0ms 0ms perl 5.40.2

nbody

Input: 5000000

lang code time stddev peak-mem mem time(user) time(sys) compiler compiler/runtime
zig 3.zig 198ms 1.1ms 1.0MB 190ms 0ms zig 0.14.1
zig 2.zig 280ms 0.5ms 1.0MB 270ms 0ms zig 0.14.1
zig 1.zig 315ms 0.8ms 1.1MB 303ms 0ms zig 0.14.1
perl 2.pl timeout 0.0ms 6.1MB 4990ms 0ms perl 5.40.2

Input: 500000

lang code time stddev peak-mem mem time(user) time(sys) compiler compiler/runtime
zig 3.zig 22ms 0.3ms 1.0MB 10ms 0ms zig 0.14.1
zig 2.zig 30ms 0.1ms 1.0MB 20ms 0ms zig 0.14.1
zig 1.zig 34ms 0.6ms 1.1MB 30ms 0ms zig 0.14.1
perl 2.pl 2731ms 3.5ms 6.1MB 2723ms 0ms perl 5.40.2

spectral-norm

Input: 8000

lang code time stddev peak-mem mem time(user) time(sys) compiler compiler/runtime
zig 1.zig 3686ms 3.7ms 1.4MB 3677ms 0ms zig 0.14.1
perl 4.pl timeout 0.0ms 10.0MB 19643ms 7ms perl 5.40.2

Input: 4000

lang code time stddev peak-mem mem time(user) time(sys) compiler compiler/runtime
zig 1.zig 925ms 2.6ms 1.3MB 917ms 0ms zig 0.14.1
perl 4.pl timeout 0.0ms 10.0MB 19530ms 3ms perl 5.40.2

Input: 2000

lang code time stddev peak-mem mem time(user) time(sys) compiler compiler/runtime
zig 1.zig 235ms 0.4ms 1.3MB 230ms 0ms zig 0.14.1
perl 4-m.pl 3449ms 32ms 9.4MB 13333ms 3ms perl 5.40.2